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Flickr Fallout

As I mentioned (and griped about in the comments) in yesterday’s post, Flickr disabled Google ID logins at some point, and yesterday it hit me. Well in reality, Yahoo did the disabling, and since they own Flickr, my Google ID got the boot. I am sure there was some sort of warning this was coming, but I did not see or notice it anywhere – just went to login yesterday and got error message after error message about it.

The Help forum wasn’t too helpful, although I suppose they tried. The truth is, to get my old account back I was going to have to jump through hoops I wasn’t willing to attempt; I am terrible at following written instructions, and when those instructions are purely internet-based without any human contact (even if it’s just a voice on a phone) is overwhelming as hell to me. I need to actually speak to someone to understand what I am supposed to do, so to force myself to figure out step one of some fairly long list of steps I am going to have to take to accomplish something, only to have step one fail and involve a second list of even more detailed sub-steps just to move to step two, was simply not going to happen. Honestly I melt down pretty quickly when something like that happens (“Wait – before you can follow these steps I just sent you, you must backtrack and undo the other five steps you were already told to follow earlier. Got that?”)

The first thing that happened Tuesday morning was that I tried to login and it failed, repeatedly. Then I read through Flickr’s thread that I had to create a Yahoo account to login. So, I did. But oh no, that was wrong, because in order to get my old, Google ID Flickr account connected to the new Yahoo one, I first had to delete the new Yahoo account I’d just been told to create to login. Then step two was to – you guessed it – login with my Google ID account. But the login for Google ID was disabled so I could not do that anyway. In the end I said to hell with it and opened a new Yahoo account and am trying to start over from there. I managed to gain access to my old account through the Flickr mobile app (first time I’ve had a use for that crappy thing) so that I could post a statement on it, asking people to follow me at the new Yahoo account, then I posted a statement on my new account stating that yes, it was, in fact, me.

Now it gets even more fun. After working to re-establish contact with users, I found that I was blocked from following new people after I’d connected with the first 20 I tried. From what I can glean skimming the help threads, Flickr is only going to allow me to follow 20 new people a day. I also cannot email because Flickr thinks I sent too many at first and therefore may be a spammer, so everyone who has emailed me to say hi is currently being ignored as I can’t respond to them. great. Then I thought, well wait – i can go to their photos and comment to let them know I appreciate them sending me an email of support – but nooooooo. Flickr has now decided that I, as a “new” member, have posted too many comments at once too, and has blocked me from adding any more to people’s photos. This sucks, because I want to let people know that I appreciate them following me to my new page, and that I am going to get back to them as soon as I can, but I can’t do it through any means on Flickr right now.

I’m also working on transferring old photos over to the new page, which actually isn’t bad since it’s forcing me to sift through everything and decide on the work I really like. It’s something I”ve been meaning to do with my old account for about a year – get rid of the scraps and just leave the best work up to view. But I had almost 2,000 photos there and it was overly daunting to even consider doing that amount of work. Here, if all goes well, I will have a much more streamlined photostream; I just hope people will see it, since right now I can’t reach out to anyone beyond the 20 I first contacted with everything hit the fan. Keep your fingers crossed that I comment and follow some more people tomorrow morning.

By the way – my husband thinks it’s the stupidest move ever for me to be opening this new account rather than waiting around for days and days for them to reconnect me to my old one. But the only way I see to get reconnected is for me to lose my mind going through all these convoluted steps and emailing Yahoo Help (oxymoron if ever I heard one) two hundred times. I just can’t bear to deal with it anymore – so I am holding out hope that on Wednesday I can once again comment and email and follow more people. If not I’m at least going to try another update statement at my new account to see if it can tide us all over until i get things established. Wish me luck!!

Update: Late Tuesday night, Yahoo emailed me suggesting I try one more thing to get my old account merged with my new one, and asked me to send them an email from the account that was connected to it. So, i did that, and now – that email server is DOWN. Totally unrelated to all the Flickr mess, but gets in the way of correcting the problem for sure. It is as if the universe wants me to let this account go.

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6 thoughts on “Flickr Fallout”

I am dizzy just contemplating this. If it had been me, I probably would have thrown in the towel far earlier than you did. I paid for Pro membership too and expect something in return, like a personal chat function. I think opening the new account was a good idea because in this world of so many things competing for everyone’s time, contacts drift away easily. It is also easy to misunderstand people when they are merely internet friends, as all you have is a one dimensional method of knowing someone, so to speak. You will eventually merge the two or just migrate the pictures, little by little and have two presences, i.e., more exposure. You handled it better than I would have, trust me. And now, you have a lovely new buddy icon or whatever they call that thing. 🙂

My husband swears I’m going to lose the new account when Yahoo figures out what to do and merges them, but whatever at this point. I’ve had other internet crises before – like getting YouTube accounts hacked, etc. – it is part of the game. Happens to all of us at one time or another. But yesterday I really was flipping out at first! The main thing I couldn’t stop worrying about was that old account just sitting there unused forever and no one knowing what happened. It felt so weird and creepy to me. Once I realized I could upload a statement from my iPhone app I felt loads better.

So glad that you have your second site up and running. Of course the rest of us have the benefit of being able to view both of your Flickr photo streams.
I would imagine that Yahoo will offer you a solution to merge the two in the very near future. Maybe.